Investigative journalist and forensic expert

British fraudster jailed

Raheem Brennerman, a business fraudster who has cost multiple British and American media organisations £2 million as the result of multiple vexatious legal actions, has been convicted in the US for multi-million dollar frauds, and criminal contempt.

In 2013, as part of ICIJ's Offshoreleaks investigations, the Sunday Times and the Guardian exposed Brennerman's planned used of offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands and Seychelles to channel profits from a £100 million planned development next door to London's Buckingham Palace. The venture failed in 2008, contributing to the UK's financial crash. Brennerman then set up new scam ventures in the UK and US, using offshore secrecy and serial lawsuits while stealing millions more.

London Internet Exchange (LINX) – Europe's major internet traffic hub – faces a growing backlash over changes to its rules that would gag its directors applying secret government orders to monitor networks, under Britain's Investigatory Powers Act.

LINX members – hundreds of internet companies – have been given less than two weeks' warning of an effect of a proposed new LINX constitution (called "memorandum and articles") that would allow secret surveillance orders or requests to be implemented without members' knowledge.

Members of LINX, the London Internet Exchange – the UK's largest net peering point – have rejected proposals that would reshape the company’s constitution and could block members from being consulted about government tapping instructions.

The vote, on Tuesday, followed a Reg report revealing that members had been given less than two weeks notice of a proposed change which would allow LINX’s chairman to “override” directors’ wishes and prevent members learning about controversial actions, including, according to LINX, “secret orders from the government”

FAMILIES and pensioners who were encouraged to invest in “ethical” tree plantations in the Amazon rainforest have lost millions of pounds in a scheme being examined by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO).

Two entrepreneurs, Omari Bowers, 37, and Andrew Skeene, 36, claimed that investors could expect returns of about 10% a year from growing teak in the rainforests. They said teak had proved a better investment than gold, property and shares.

The business partners, both from London, impressed their clients with their commitment to regenerating deforested land in Brazil but investors are now pursuing millions of pounds that have been lost in the Global Forestry Investment scheme.

Members of the House of Commons and House of Lords have said they intend to raise questions when Parliament starts sitting this week. Here, we set out the documentary evidence of email monitoring, including from highly classified GCHQ and NSA documents released by Edward Snowden.

GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA) have access to intercepted emails sent and received by all members of the UK Parliament and peers, including with their constituents, a Computer Weekly investigation has established.

The intelligence agency in Cheltenham has been able to harvest traffic details of all parliamentary emails, including details of the sender, recipient and subject matter, for at least three years. As a result, details of private email correspondence between MPs and constituents are being collected by GCHQ as a matter of routine.

GCHQ documents classified above top secret, released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, also reveal that the spy agency has the capability to scan the content of parliamentary emails for “keywords” through an established cyber defence network that is connected to commercial software used to filter spam emails from MPs’ inboxes.

New questions raised about Britain’s snoopers’ charter after Denmark abandons its own UK-style surveillance programme for a second time

Britain’s biggest web companies will be forced to build a national network of massive internet surveillance centres, likely to cost billions of pounds, if MPs approve proposals the Home Office is determined to rush through Parliament after Easter.

MPs have been given only two weeks to read 1,200 pages of documents which disclose new powers to require technology companies to install secret surveillance capabilities in software, computer equipment or networks.

Computer businesses or IT staff who fail to destroy security on their products or services on demand, or who decline a Home Office order to hack their customers in Britain or overseas by installing or operating government malware, could face bankruptcy or long jail sentences if a new law before parliament goes ahead.

Investigatory Powers Bill

Duncan provided written evidence to the Joint Committee on the controversial new Investigatory Powers bill in December 2015 (inital submission and supplementary follow-up). The Committee is expected to report in February 2016.

We have also set up print-on-demand A5-book versions of the Draft Bill text and Home Office papers supporting the bill, as well as the three major 2015 surveillance reports that led up to it. Advocates as well as opponents of the new Home Office plans may find these bound volumes more convenient than the online PDF documents. (No revenue is generated to us from these books, they are set at the lowest price that Lulu will allow.)

The "Big Brother" comprehensive national database system feared by many MPs has been built behind their backs over the last decade, and even has a name for its most intrusive component: a central London national phone and internet tapping centre called PRESTON.

PRESTON, which collects about four million intercepted phone calls a year, has also recently been used to plant malware on iPhones, according to disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The phones were then targetted for MI5 "implants" (malware), authorised by a ministerial warrant.

Invasion of the bungalows

Cold war history

During the 1950s, dozens of bungalows of almost identical design were secretly built across the length and breadth of Britain. Inside every one was a discrete guardroom, and a rear shaft leading down to protected radiation and blast proofed underground bunkers.

Many of them became emergency government regional wartime control centers during the Cold War.

All of the bunker network, called ROTOR, has been declassified and the bunkers decommissioned and sold off. This report from London's Time Out magazine, identified the network for the first time.

Protecting members of Parliament from mass surveillance by bulk collection is “exceedingly simple”, according to the US co-inventor of the high technology devices and programs now used by GCHQ to intercept optical fibre cables carrying Internet data in and out of Britain.

Bill Binney, formerly Technical Director of the NSA’s Operations Directorate, dismissed as “absolute horseshit” claims by government lawyers to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), reported in an adjudication last month, that “there is so much data flowing along the pipe” that “it isn’t intelligible at the point of interception”.

The now-confirmed ECHELON communications satellite surveillance system run by NSA's and its "Five Eyes" allies has doubled in scale since 2000, and could quadruple, according to open research triggered by Edward Snowden's revelations. The expansion has been further enhanced by linking in other FORNSAT (foreign satellite) interception sites run by NSA's allies in secret pacts, including Germany, France, Spain, Sweden and Denmark. Read More...

After 27 years, the truth about the ECHELON surveillance system is out. NSA documents, published in the Intercept, reveal that the ECHELON system was setup "at the height of the Cold War" to spy on the west's communication satellite network, Intelsat.

"Yes, there is an ECHELON system", an NSA history note records, at the same time as making derisory references to the European Parliament's investigation in 2000 and 2001. Read More...

Fireside chats with spooks and ex-spooks about mass global communications surveillance and the "cold winds of transparency" brought about by Edward Snowden might seem an unlikely event for critical regulators, Google, Apple, and people like me. But that's what happened mid-May at the elegant private conference centre at Ditchley Park, near Oxford... Read More...

One year after The Guardian opened up the trove of top secret American and British documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) sysadmin Edward J Snowden, the world of data security and personal information safety has been turned on its head.

Everything about the safety of the internet as a common communication medium has been shown to be broken...Read More...

Above-top-secret details of Britain’s covert surveillance programme - including the location of a clandestine British base tapping undersea cables in the Middle East - have so far remained secret, despite being leaked by fugitive NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden. Government pressure has meant that some media organisations, despite being in possession of these facts, have declined to reveal them.Read More...

Claims that GCHQ has maintained spying operations even after US pulled out. The front page report for the Independent resulted in the British ambassador being summoned to the German foreign ministry. Read main story here

Edinburgh, 21 June

CRISP is the Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy, an inter-university collaboration. CRISP say that places (free, but reservation only) are filling fast.

Uni Masterclass in Mass Surveillance

Duncan and former senior NSA director and whistleblower Bill Binney ran a masterclass in Mass Surveillance for a large academic audience at the University of Sussex in March 2016. Media lecturer Dr Alban Webb said that the class focussed "many discussions in the Sussex academic community". The Lab team and Ioann Stacewicz have published a full video of the session.

Duncan's report in the Independent about the British electronic embassy spying operation in the heart of Berlin, called TRYST, aroused German government anger soon after Chancellor Merkel learned that he cellphone had been targeted by NSA. Read more and more

Offshore Leaks

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists's "Offshore Leaks" investigation lifted the veil on the secret world of tax havens. Read More

The Capenhurst Tower

Read how Richard Lamont and Duncan Campbell exposed the true purpose of the Capenhurst Tower. Read more